Does this go here? I don’t know so please move it if needs be.
Since we’re living smack dab in the middle of the enshittocene it seems only right to carry on the thread.
Cory was correct, but nevertheless, we persisted.
https://boingboing.net/2024/02/13/enshittification-is-coming-for-everything.html
Rather than putting an example, I just want to ask: when does it end, and how? If I remember right Cory’s answer was essentially “once they start enforcing antitrust legislation again”, but I haven’t been following him super closely. Is there a more recent or correct answer than that?
I’ve been meaning to read it but the book he wrote with Rebecca Giblin may offer some solutions - Chokepoint Capitalism
Proper enforcement in the form of people like Lina Khan.
ETA: I’ll admit to having very unsatisfactory answers to this because, at the moment, there seems no way out of the enshittocene, but i’m sure some said the same about the divine right of kings (to paraphrase Ursula K Le Guin). Tech companies seem too big to fail, too big to care and the fines they receive just seem to be the price of doing business. 
Technically it doesn’t, unless we start clawing back rights, and is going to be difficult.
In the software front, we need to stop purchasing SAAS (Software as a Service), and enforce the user right to purchase permanent licenses at a reasonable - read: equivalent, not overinflated so nobody buys it- price.
This is a difficult proposition because how costs are computed in companies. Monthly expenses are computed differently that lump payments, in favor of the former; that’s why they usually rent and not buy equipment like cars and computers - and for at least the last decade… people.
So companies want to buy SAAS. And for some users it also makes sense to only pay for the month they are using the product… But the problem with SAAS is that the moment you stop owning the product, you stop being able to influence the development of it.
If you buy version to version, and the new version’s improvements are not worth the price of upgrading, you won’t buy it, and keep using the old version. With SAAS, you’re getting the improvements, even if they are not improvements, and the only alternative is to stop using the software at all which sometimes is an option (see Blender success story) but normally is not (I’m an open source adopter and defender, but LibreOffice, Gimp and FreeCAD are not and won’t be a for a long time a good replacement for Office, Photoshop and Fusion at professional level).
So companies who are stuck in incremental version payments usually are motivated to make good improvements. Companies who are embedded in SAAS cycles are not, and are free to enshittify.
Another point in a complete different direction is to limit the power of investors in companies. Most companies are, in effect, torn upon satisfying the customers (and not shafting their employees) and satisfying the insatiable hunger of their investors. And usually end up doing whatever the latter demands, specially once the board of directors is replaced with a “not much experience with the sector but a lot of experiency extracting value” CEO, which will proceed to fire half of the employees, and enshittify the product.
I always fear the moment a small company I followed announces they successfully completed a round of funding, because usually this funding comes with extra obligations that basically will suck the life of that company and will make it a bit worse.
I’m no economist so I have no idea how we could curb the power of investors in a way they are still entused to give money (for me the obvious solution is to guillotine the investors, give the money to the state, and use that money to fund public services and grants with fewer obligations to smaller companies, but probably I’m going to be called crazy and unamerican for saying something like this so…) but I’m sure someone smarter than me will figure it out.
This is a far more thorough and considered answer. 
You’re right though about SAAS, it is a curse of the current enshittocene.and i absolutely detest it in all its forms. A pox on all their houses.
Not to keep linking to Cory’s blog but this bit stood out to me regarding Amazon’s plan to add more ads to Prime -
Instead, they can shoot for the much more lucrative equilibrium of “so obnoxious that the viewer is almost ready to cancel their subscription (but not quite).”
I don’t recall what podcast it was that i was listening to that covered this, but my vague memory of it (and i’m probably getting it wrong or over simplifying) was that right now the market works is that investors/companies place weight on unlimited growth and profits because that’s just what the rules that have been set focus on. A company is seem as successful purely only on their profits. So everything is built around that, and if the company fails you just pivot to the next to the next investment.
A solution is to change the rules and regulations to require companies to invest in sustainability and their workforce, and have that be part of the measure for success and value of it.
Though as Abe says, the other piece of the pie is that a lot of services and institutions should not be in private hands.
It started in software, to be sure, but SAAS is just one of the many, many capitalist feudalisms that us littles are suffering through. See also: investment firms gobbling up single-family homes, unrepairable devices, bricked-on-end-of-support IOT crap, etc. – all of which has come up in this context.
Enshittification is the catch-all symptom of a late capitalism that is trying desperately to monetize the very fact of possession of a thing – and largely succeeding.
There are some challenges though. I do work which, if the source code were revealed, the value would go to zero because it controls for a statistical phenomenon. I have no recourse to patents, copyright would be easy to evade, trademarks are useless. I would probably never even notice another firm using the techniques until it was too late, and court fights usually go to the better capitalized and connected party in those cases anyhow.
“Information wants to be free” and it wants to be expensive.
What I won’t do, however, is obscure your data or hide the analysis results. My customers control that 100%. Interoperability is another theme that Cory pushes, which I think is a part of the solution.
I think the core problem is too much loose change chasing too few true economic improvements, or chasing the wrong avenues for economic improvement. We also end up mistaking effective salesmanship, showmanship really, for economic productivity. We export our high value-add jobs to low-regulation environments, gutting our economy and theirs in one cruel stroke.
Yeah, my take was more on a problem I have experience and I know how to solve, and a problem I have experience and I don’t know how to solve. It would be very easy to just use the card:
Because is true. But I though maybe speaking of specific examples and could be done to fix them would be a good start for a reply to Hanglyman 
Note that I did not say “I want free software”. I am a proponent of Free and Open Source software, but I also was a longtime paying customer of Microsoft Windows, and Office, and Photoshop… And I would probably been a fusion customer if I did not directly start with FreeCad and learned to live with its limitations 
And actually, enshittification of the Open Source movement that transformed it from a “counter-culture technopioneer” to a “let’s profit from volunteer labor” movement is a current point of discussion, because nobody noticed sliding into this until it was way too late.
I think there’s a place for Commercial Software, and even good reasons for not open source it. The only thing I ask is for the Commercial Software to be fully interoperable with their peers (so, keep your algorithms, but open the data format) - and IIRC that’s now guaranteed in the EU, at least partially.
That is by design. Vienna school economics treat labor as an impersonal resource, which has no effect on the economy cycle because “the market will provide alternatives”. We know how well it works 
Antitrust action will help a little bit. What will actually help is when we adjust what we mean by “exclusive rights” for patents. That should be “exclusive rights to royalties” and not “exclusive rights to buy the patent and put it in a shit product or not use it at all”.
That way, the chokepoint monopolists cannot monopolize and products can get good again.
Which is why, IMHO, the genius feature of the 
is freedom of movement; at least if we’re playing the Vienna school economic game, that impersonal resource can move to where the demand is. Here in the 
USCAM zone we prefer most of our under-regulated labourers to stay in their own impoverished little corner. /s This creates suffering and, I think, grinds on productivity in the end.
I’d be happy if Word opened my files from 1989.
This is one reason I enforce the (perceived) misery of the Open Source alternatives, donating to the foundations where I can, on my colleagues. The security aspect is the other, but that’s a longer and more miserable tale.
Bought it, read it, recommend it 100%. I was familiar with the thesis, but I found it really valuable to bring myself up to date on the thinking and round out my knowledge.
Speaking of enshittification…
When I first started up my business, I purchased a lot of lifetime software deals, mostly through AppSumo. These work as fundraisers for early stage software companies. They’re a bit like playing slots at Vegas - most of the time you crap out, but every so often, you win the lottery.
Several of the deals I purchased went out of business, but a few have gone on to be the backbone of my business.
There’s a second hand market for these deals, and a few people who invest in them as a business strategy - holding on to them until they become more valuable, then reselling them for a profit.
Now that I’ve been in business awhile, I find the deals I’ve purchased that have stayed in business and become full-featured are the tools I most like to work with. On the other hand, there’s several that I held on to where the companies just decided to drop their responsibility to the owners of the lifetime deals, and there isn’t much we can do about that.
The subscriptions I’ve had for major tools, like Canva, it’s really hard when I need to take a break for a month or 2, especially anything that involves my data. If I have an issue with Google Drive subscription payment, for example, I get so scared of losing all my data that is stored there. Feels really tenuous.
Lately, there have been a slew of lifetime deals that have closed down. There’s word on the street in the lifetime deal world that some unsavory actors game the system to grab some cash before closing a company down. Hopefully things will resolve, but it seems like the golden age has passed on these.
Thanks, that video about shit is some good shit!
Reminds me of this excellent comic…
remind me later to finish reading it!
And on that note…
This will save Americans at least $677 million, every year. Which is to say, it will cost the banks at least $670 million every year.
Edit: “This” is the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau enforcing interoperability between banks, and enforcing a rule that says they have to make your data easily transferable to another institution of your choice.
So, need we ask again why the extremely wealthy in the and are fighting tooth and nail against this sort of thing.
We’ve had some moves in , well behind the scenes, that put billions in the federal treasury that was previously being paid out to banks exploiting a really tenuous tax loophole. I think they should crow a bit more about that. The lawyer who fixed the situation had been ejected from her Bay St. practice for not complying with the bank’s requests for legal a**-coverage, and ended up at CRA, our tax department.
Why can’t they leave the basics utilities alone and focus their “improvements” on the fully featured software?
I use Notepad all the time, as a notepad. The last thing I need is bloat. If I need to interact with text on a more complex level, I use Word or Notepad++ anyway, depending on the nature of the interaction.